It was Milly’s second birthday today.

On Sunday we spent a couple hours of happy browsing in a kids toy store from which we emerged with a backpack full of toys and the conviction that, since we liked these toys, Milly surely must do too. Our favourite was the cute little giraffe with the bellybutton where you could poke your finger in. And since Milly loves giraffes, we figured she would be thrilled.

This is a picture of the giraffe with a kind of water pistol (and a bell bracelet) we got for her too:

Milly’s reaction to the giraffe was instantaneous – though not exactly what we expected it to be. After unwrapping it she threw herself into the arms of her father looking really frightened. So Olivia explained that it looked a bit like a M-O-O-S-E (not wanting to even speak the word out loud). Turned out that Milly was afraid of moose. Probably because her friend Jozef had a toy moose head on a stick with jingles on its ears. And we had managed to buy a giraffe whose face reminded Milly of that toy. And to make things worse, we had also bought the bell bracelet and put it around the giraffe’s head.

So in the next half hour we all tried to convince Milly that this was really not a moose and that in fact it was a really cute giraffe with a belly button (Milly likes belly buttons too). Two things we learned from that: 1) Cuteness is very subjective and not something you can convince a child with Moosophobia of. 2) Killer instinct is something we are all born with. Proven by the fact that Milly tried to hack the giraffe/moose to pieces with a large fridge magnet while seemingly casually walking past it and with a suprising swiftness and without missing a beat turning right and stabbing at it. An image we probably won’t forget for a long time to come.